Recruitment Agents in a Debt‐Financed Migration Regime: Moving Domestic Workers From Indonesia to Singapore

ABSTRACT

In ‘fly now, pay later’ systems across Southeast Asia, migrant domestic workers accrue a snowballing debt, through recruitment processes beginning in their source villages and ending in their employers’ homes, which they repay through salary deductions. We examine debt as it circulates spatially across borders, temporally over the course of migrants’ recruitment and socially among a chain of migrant brokers and employers. On the basis of qualitative interviews with agents, regulatory authorities and NGO representatives in Singapore and Indonesia, we theorise recruitment agents as debt‐financed migration infrastructure. The capacity of Singapore‐based agents to bear and pass on debt accommodates low‐level corruption in Indonesia and advances to the migrant's family to secure recruitment. Agents manage the risks of debt through investing in phatic labour and relationship upkeep, recasting business partnerships through the regime of friendship. The collective capacity of agents to (re)distribute defaulted debt partly accounts for the efficacy of agents as infrastructure.